In 1963, the Press published Viola Spolin's landmark volume, Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, which has sold more than 100,000 copies since its publication, and Northwestern's theater list includes works by Tony and Academy Award winners such as Mary Zimmerman, Tracy Letts, Bruce Norris, and Horton Foote, as well as playwrights David Ives, Craig Wright, and Ike Holter.

SPEP is a series of scholarly monographs and translations founded by James M. Edie and published by Northwestern University Press since the early 1960s, including works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Edmund Husserl.

Authors whose works the series explores include Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Zamyatin, Pasternak, and Nabokov.

[14] The imprint includes works by Luis Rodríguez, Martín Espada, Gioconda Belli, Claribel Alegria, Salah Al Hamdani, Ana Castillo, Wayne Karlin, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sergio Ramírez, and Le Clézio.

In 1997 the Press won the National Book Award for Poetry for William Meredith's Effort at Speech, followed by a 2011 win for Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split.

Northwestern University Press published Herta Müller's novel Traveling on One Leg which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

Also for "Incendiary Art", Patricia Smith (poet) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry in 2018.